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In a trailblazing move, Microsoft has announced that it will only work with vendors in the US who offer paid parental leave to employees who have either just had a kid or adopted one. Under the move announced on August 30, Microsoft said suppliers and contractors with more than 50 employees must offer their employees at least 12 weeks of paid parental leave if they want to do business with the tech firm.
This move has far-reaching implications as SMEs and start-ups would be forced to introduce employee-friendly policies. The new policy will be phased in over the next year, said Dev Stahlkopf, the company’s corporate vice-president and general counsel, in a blog post. “We appreciate that this may ultimately result in increased costs for Microsoft, and we’ll put a process in place for addressing these issues with our suppliers,” he said.
Only 13 per cent of US workers in the private sector have access to paid leave.
India likes 5-day weeks
If pay were to remain constant, how many days would employees like to work? One-third of global workers felt four days a week was ideal, 20 per cent said they would work three days a week, according to a culture study survey by US-based workforce management firm, Kronos. More Indians (69 per cent) however voted for five days a week even if they had the option of working fewer days for the same pay. Mexico was second highest at 43 per cent of workers. The UK and France were the two countries least happy about five-day work weeks with barely 16 per cent and 17 per cent amongst them voting for it.
Jobs in demand
A machine learning engineer is the most in demand job in India, according to a new report from LinkedIn. The role of machine learning engineer has seen 43 times higher growth in the last five years, says the ‘Top 10 Emerging Jobs in India’ report from LinkedIn. An application development analyst’s role grew 32 times between 2013 and 2017 and was the second most in demand. Among the top five job roles were back-end developers, full stack engineers and data scientists. In sixth space was Customer service management which saw 27 per cent growth in demand in the period. An interesting insight in the report is that over 50 per cent of machine learning engineers learnt their skill on the job.
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